Anagyrous — also written Anagyrus, Anagyruntus, or Anagyrountos (Ἀναγυροῦντος) — was one of the demes of ancient Attica, the civic subdivisions through which Athenian citizenship was organized. It belonged to the phyle Erechtheis, one of the ten tribal divisions of Attica. The deme was situated in the south of Attica near the promontory Zoster, on the Saronic coast. The geographer Pausanias noted a temple of the mother of the gods at this location — a shrine to Cybele, the Phrygian earth goddess whose cult had spread widely through the Greek world. The ancient name held on longer than most: the geographer and historian Stephanus of Byzantium still used it around 600 AD, nearly a thousand years after the classical period.

The ruins of Anagyrous were found near the modern village of Vari, and what the archaeologists have identified — despite most of the site remaining unexcavated — suggests a depth of occupation that spans millennia. Human habitation dates back to the third millennium BCE. The site includes a fortification and acropolis at Lathouriza, built and occupied between the 7th and 3rd centuries BC; the remains of 25 small houses; a sacred altar; ten funerary precincts; and a major Mycenaean cemetery. There is also a Cave of the Nymphs and Pan, which a man named Archedimus of Thera — described as a nympholept, one seized by the nymphs — converted into a sanctuary, carving reliefs of the Nymphs, Apollo, Hermes, Pan, and other figures directly into the rock walls. A cemetery and palaestra from the Classical period round out the catalog. All of this, largely unexamined by the trowel, waits beneath the hillside.

Two explanations compete for the origin of the name Anagyrous. The first traces it to a mythical hero named Anagyros, who once made the houses near his sacred grove tremble and collapse, and who exterminated an entire family for cutting trees from his precinct. His anger was so feared that offerings and sacrifices were brought regularly to appease him — hence the ancient proverb "Anagryasion Daimon," the Demon of Anagyros. The second explanation points to the plant: Anagyris foetida, the stinking bean trefoil, which Dioscorides described in the 1st century AD as both an emetic and a laxative. The plant grows in the valley, exuding what ancient sources call a terrible stench when disturbed. Both etymologies, hero and plant, share a quality of threat — something that punishes those who disturb it. The place-name carries that warning still.

The ancient writer Aelian recorded an anecdote about the countryside near Anagyrous that has stuck to the place ever since. Aristion and Periktyoni — Plato's parents — used to bring their infant son to the fields and myrtle groves here. And while the baby Plato slept among the dense, leafy myrtles, a swarm of bees settled peacefully on his lips. The Greek text says the bees were "surmising the eloquence of Plato" — anticipating, with insect prescience, the honeyed words that would come from that small mouth. It is a lovely legend, the kind that ancient biographers attached to great men to signal their exceptional nature from birth. Whether or not bees ever touched the lips of the infant philosopher, the image has a rightness to it: a gifted child sleeping in a valley of fragrant plants, on the shores of the sea that bordered the ancient world's most consequential city.